Our information suggests the Xbox One design is based on an ambitious brief, essentially impossible to test in anything resembling real-life conditions, and so the company played it safe, putting unit reliability first. A highly placed source says that the console has been designed with a ten-year lifecycle in mind and that it is designed to be switched on for that entire period.

What's more, during that time it needs to operate almost silently in order to earn its place in the living room. It's a unique hardware challenge, and so the company opted for a large design where heat dissipation comes first. Microsoft's engineers are also aware that the company's reputation for quality hardware is still in the balance after the Red Ring of Death Xbox 360 build quality fiasco, which cost the company over a billion dollars.

All of this ultimately leaves Nintendo in profit, ticking over and not in immediate danger, but faced with the increasingly real possibility of its first proper home-console flop - and with an operating loss of around $50m to try to correct. It certainly does not leave Nintendo on its knees. The Wii U in isolation, however, is a different story: the console is in huge trouble, and it's going to take something special in the next six months to turn the situation around.

Here's GameSpot on an intriguing new multiplayer mode in the next Batman game:

Being developed by Splash Damage while WB Games Montreal works on the single-player game, Invisible Predator Online is an asymmetrical, three-vs.-three-vs.-two mode. The teams of three play as members of Bane's gang or members of the Joker's gang, who are jockeying for position and power in Gotham, battling over a piece of turf. (During the gameplay demo I participated in, the map was Blackgate Prison, a location which, of course, figures prominently in the upcoming 3DS and Vita game Batman: Arkham Origins Blackgate.) The goal for these two gangs is to defeat the other, whittling down their available respawns via kills or taking control of command points scattered around the map.

But these gangs have bigger things to worry about than just each other. As Batman and Robin, two other players attempt to disrupt both gangs' efforts to assert dominance in Gotham.

The ex-EA chief talks to GIbiz about the state of the games industry. It's interesting stuff, especially his take on the next-gen consoles:

"I think they'll be bigger than the last generation, actually. The last generation can be described as supercharged engines - they had super-powerful boxes. But the entirety of the online communication and being able to connect to your friends and all that stuff, a seamless, smooth, social experience, was just masking tape - barely put together. Remember that this was eight years ago. Most people were just moving on from their 28k modems. Now these are fully functioning, fully integrated online computers connected to the best screen in your house."

A great article by Tevis Thompson celebrating the idea of games designed to be savoured rather than slammed through:

Imagine a video game that doesn't aim to pass the time but instead to slow it down. One that doesn't encourage binging, but rather asks the player to inhabit time and feel its passing more intensely. There are already movements for slow food, slow travel, even slow parenting. Why not slow games? Games that aren't merely nonviolent or cerebral but that purposely take their time, that resist players and delay gratification, that reveal themselves only gradually and require more deliberate engagement. Games that emphasize texture, tone, and the very experience of time itself, both in and outside the game.

Can definitely recommend all the titles Tevis mentions, especially Stickets...